The case for empathyCase Western psychology professor Julie Exline agrees.

“There needs to be this relational openness along with this thoughtful, analytical reasoning,” she says.

Exline says, empathy -- being open to another person’s point of view --provides emotional understanding when analytical tools fall short.

“So there’s an openness that’s implied in it to something else that might be out there that’s more than just our current set of resources that you have access to in your own mind.”

Exline says, by engaging the empathetic neural network, we break through the limits of strictly rational reasoning.

“I think it can also open up people to the idea of a greater reality that’s maybe beyond what we can understand because there’s that fundamental aspect of listening and appreciating things about the other.”

Empathy is more like a journey of relating my experience to your experience, says Tony Jack, "and it's one where you never get the final definitive answer.”

Credit JEFF ST.CLAIR / WKSU

Embracing the unknowableHe says it’s OK that our brains are hardwired to hold competing, and often irreconcilable views of what’s happening around us.

And, he says, there’s a word for it: “Incommensurability, a way of thinking and speaking that just can’t ever be fully translated into another way of thinking.”

Science and spiritual inquiry, says Jack, are like breathing in, and breathing out. “You can’t do both at the same time, but you need both to stay healthy and well.”

In other words, we can hold some truths to be self-evident without published data.

“And what we find is that in relation to these spiritual struggles, as with a lot of other troubling things in their lives, that to the extent that people make use of this avoidance, it makes it more difficult to cope.”

Stepping beyond the limits of scienceAll of us, she says, at some point confront the idea that there’s something fundamentally beyond us that we may never be able to understand.

“And that sense of smallness can either bring a sense of mystery and hope, or it could bring a sense of inferiority, meaninglessness humiliation.”

And Exline says our analytical mind sometimes comes up short of answers.

“If the goal in the approach to science is to nail everything down with a mechanistic ultimate aim of prediction and control, then we’re really missing the boat.”

So, she says, it’s healthy to embrace the uncertainty, even if it scares us.

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